AMA: Hubspot Former Product Marketing Group Lead, Marcus Andrews on Product Launches

At HubSpot our PMMs are aligned by product line and are aligned to a Product director and GM, although we still meet regularly with our individual PMs. I think in general we try and tell a higher level story that doesn't really focus too much on any one feature but often certain features are very marketable. This is primarly the PMM's job to call out. To make it known that they are very excited about a certain feature and blow it up in the marketing launch. I think my product managers really apr ...Read More

Product marketing is often defined as the people who position the products, but I think it's as equally important (especially as you grow bigger) that Product Marketing is also the most cross functional role in marketing. Creating alignment, securing buy-in, and building momentum around a launch is just as important (if not more) as any positioning work you've done. After all what good is a great narrative if no-one put it to use? If you want to ace this there are two things you need to do reall ...Read More

Going to cop out on this one a little bit (all the parts are important!) and just tell you how we did it at HubSpot. There are many ways to slice it but our approach has worked really well for us. We always start with the change in the world. How people are different today, where they are headed and why. This is a great set up and will quickly give your positioning context and root it in a specific market and audience. We then talk about how businesses (or whoever your persona is) has to adapt t ...Read More

Great question!  First and foremost your launches have to have substance and that should dictate the cadence more than marketing need. I've seen some companies try and do a launch every week and it starts off great but then loses momentum quickly because people stop caring. Thats a bad situtation to be in. The launches just don't have enough substance and people are overwhelmed.  You may have lots of different updates happening all the time, but the trick is packaged them up into a bigger more i ...Read More

Our product teams are great at this and we glean a lot from them during a launch but we’ll also do a lot of customer interviews on our own. I also always learn a lot from talking to our own Service team, but I specifically work on software for service teams. Often we also run a big survey to collect data points that support our narrative. For instance recently we wanted to figure out how many people invest in customer listening and advocacy tools. So we ran a big survey and that asked questions ...Read More

I know this pain!  Part of working at a product driven company is that this will happen and it's ok. The health of the product should come first and that will disrupt markeitng plans for time to time. Stick it out. Don't stop doing product launches just because the timelines didn't work out a few times.  Other things you can do (which we have done) are seperate the marketing launch timeline form the product launch timeline a bit. Maybe the product goes into open beta a month before the launch st ...Read More

There are a number of ways we keep everyone up to date on the progress during a launch. Luckily at HubSpot we also have project managers to help us. I’ll say it, I’m not a good project manager. It’s another level of organization that I was just not born with. These people really help during this process, bless their meticulously organized souls. We usually have a bi-weekly or weekly meeting as we run up to a launch with everyone who is part of the DARCI model. The key stakeholders. This is a ser ...Read More

This is such a great question! At some point every PMM will find themselves in a situation when they are asked to launch a product that just isn’t ready. It’s always a mistake to go too early (launching too late isn’t good either but less dangerous). If it’s truly an MVP and you launch it with the expectation it isn’t people will be disappointed. I think it’s possible to change the narrative around your product but why take the risk? A launch should be a celebration and underwhelming people at t ...Read More

Strategic advice: Is it a good idea to do them at the same time? You could separate them and stretch out the pop you’d get from each. Also, can you tie them together? For many companies their brand story is tightly aligned to their product story, this is especially true for product driven companies. Which in my opinion are the type of companies that built to win in the future. Tactical advice: Do some sort of event for the rebrand. Such a good opportunity to bring people together who you care ab ...Read More